"They've been here for quite a while, haven't they? Over a day... No, that's not right! Actually, it hasn't been that long!"

Lin Yi suddenly realized that if he referred to the time frame of the dream, it should still be 4 p.m. on May 7th, X023, not the early morning of May 8th, which was when he was dreaming.

This group of female teachers must have come here after abducting those people at the school gates.

"Did they arrive early and have been waiting for someone to open the door, or did they just get here and happened to run into Maozi?"

Lin Yi was more inclined towards the first possibility.

"However... how exactly did they get to the Art Building?"

Lin Yi narrowed his eyes, realizing that the pathways mentioned in the Art Department rules were not the only pathways between the campus and the Art Building.

Just as Tian Bufan had said, there might be many more secretive pathways hidden, it's just that the conditions for traversing them were exacting for the people who walked them.

"Or perhaps, just like the dormitory supervisor can take Maozi to the Art Building, those peculiar art teachers can also bring people here... But if they took that pathway, could those people become art students?"

Lin Yi's intuition told him that even if those people reached the Art Building, their status would not be the same as Mao Feiyang's 'Art Student' identity.

At least so far, Mao Feiyang was not much different from an Experience Student, and if one didn't look at the identity credential, it would actually be quite difficult to distinguish them.

Lin Yi slowly shelved his speculations and then turned his attention to the overall environment of the art classroom.

The art classroom was far larger than the lecture rooms in the Teaching Building, be it the overall architectural environment or design elements, all exuded a cult and abstract-expressionist homage to demonology and theism.

The interior design of the classroom was strikingly similar to an Ancient Greek opera house, with the teacher's podium resembling a huge hemispherical "stage", behind which was an arched decorative wall. The wall was engraved with mural after mural, and between the murals were countless odd symbols and characters, as if they were displaying some ancient myth and secret history.

Where the students sat was akin to the audience section of an opera house.

These seats were located in the hemispherical area in front of the stage, made up of seats arranged like fish scales. In ancient times, these seats were often divided into different ranks, allowing feudal lords to determine the audience's seating based on social status, but clearly, in the art classroom, there was no such cunningly designed hierarchy.

However, Lin Yi always felt that this art classroom might have been transformed from an opera house...

Around the art classroom, there were doors distributed across the stone walls, one of which was the door through which Mao Feiyang had entered.

It was evident that the Art Building might have only one or a few art classrooms, and all the doors marked "Art Classroom" in the corridors led to this art classroom.

That's why the rules stated that one only needed to confirm if the doorplate reads "Art Classroom", and not bother about the sequence of numbers behind it.

Lin Yi also noticed that beside the central stage of the art classroom, there was a passageway leading to the watchtower.

This watchtower was not the same as the one in the Art Office; instead, it was the kind mentioned in the Art Student Rules that was used as a platform for art students to draw from life.

If Lin Yi wasn't mistaken, around 1 p.m. "today", Mao Feiyang would go up to the watchtower to draw from life and then, at the same time, from the cafeteria after having lunch, he would traverse layers and have a magical face-to-face encounter with his former self.

Thinking of this, a strong sense of curiosity and anticipation surged in Lin Yi's heart, but he also worried whether he could dream for that long...

"I wonder how long this dream will last...?" He felt like he had been dreaming for a very long time and had no idea when he would wake up.

But dreams, those mysterious and immeasurable phenomena, could cause one's perception of "time" and certain "senses" to distort, so even though the dream seemed lengthy, it was hard to say how much time had actually passed in reality.

He discovered that nearly half of the seats in the art classroom were occupied, possibly numbering in the low thousands, equivalent to the number of students in an entire teaching building.

Some of these students were flipping through books, while others were observing the statues and frescoes on the central stage as if they were basking in the atmosphere of art, their expressions varied.

At this time, the delicate moonlight had almost faded, and the edge of the distant sky was about to welcome the sunrise...

The last cool moonlight of the night traversed through the crystal-like dome, sprinkling onto the central stage, where white powder particles floated through the air like dust and then... like snowflakes fell upon the bodies of the art students, merging into them.

Lin Yi, seeing such a scene, was first stunned, then suddenly realized that these white powder particles were the same pollutants that Mao Feiyang had been contaminated with by the green-pocketed chef, constantly drawn from the air into their bodies, then spread to them like a divergence.

"Contaminants... are omnipresent in the Art Building!!!"

"I can actually see these pollutants clearly now?"

"Wait, did I really 'see' them?"

He closed his eyes and found that, upon doing so, his field of vision was pitch-dark, yet the floating, airborne white powder particles were still clearly visible, like the fireflies in the night.

"This is...?"

The Art Student Rules state, "Perception is a magical artistic talent, and you will gradually master the ability to use this art to distinguish between 'goodwill' and 'malice'."

"Could this be the so-called 'Perception'? "

"According to the rules, this seems to be a characteristic of art students... but maybe it's not just a characteristic of art students, but something based on an individual's sensitivity and the level of contamination that can be gradually observed."

"Am I perceiving this because I was touched by Maozi's 'light,' or is it because of my so-called high sensitivity, or have I been contaminated too?"

"Or... is it a combination of all these factors?"

This perception ability is still very weak, like a swimming beginner who can barely sense a sliver, but this thing is like a vast domain, once you step into it, you are drawn by the domain.

Just like the Sports Student's theory of magnetic fields, it's evident that Mao Feiyang has already stepped into the domain belonging to the 'Art Student' status, and now, he suspected he had also stepped into this magnetic field...

From the timeline, he was contaminated when Mao Feiyang turned to look at the green-pocketed chef, and in the time that followed, he was both receiving the spread of contaminants from Mao Feiyang and absorbing more on his own, leading to the inadvertent production of numerous Phantom Visions in the Teaching Building.

Especially when he heard a voice in the foggy Teaching Building that seemed to come from a Sea Monster...

This voice traversed layers, and to some extent even originated from Mao Feiyang's contamination.

But he did not know, and because he did not know, he subconsciously harbored distrust towards his surroundings and even experienced problems with falling through layers in an extremely short amount of time.

Throughout the whole process, he had no idea how much of the powdery white contaminants he had absorbed!

And at this time... what was Mao Feiyang doing as he continued to absorb contaminants?

It seemed like... he was reviewing the logic of a Non-human Classmate's murder, and after he had removed the other's notice, was countered with a sneak attack by that fellow, wasn't he?

Lin Yi still remembered the Non-human Classmate, who had specially followed his memory to test him after his attention had been diverted, and now it seemed there was some trickery involved.

"Could it be... that those non-human things targeted me not just because I saw them, but also because there's something about me that attracts them?"

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